More new biochar ideas from The Warm Heart team part 2

More new biochar ideas from The Warm Heart team part 2. See the first post in this series http://biocharproject.org/charmasters-log/new-biochar-ideas/

E, Dolph, aloha kaua-

Here is the material for the second half of the post. Hope it is helpful for your readers.

Photo 16) Stoking the WH XLT1k with long bamboo. The XLT is a 1 m3 LLU trough. Its length (4.7m) was specifically designed for bamboo feedstock to minimize the time, effort, and expense of cutting. The same calculus should hold for pole pine and coppiced wood. Note the placement of the 3 long handles on the side, thus allowing for up to a 12 person carry for heavy loads.

Photo 17) XLT1k – long view with fire in the box. Note the detail of the long handles

This is the original test unit for the FC Trough concept in general and sized for comparison tests with the UB JRO 200 l TLUD oven design. It showed conclusively that the two were complimentary at equivalent size. If the feedstock is of appropriate size, the ‘light and leave’ characteristic of the JRO has the advantage over the ‘light and attend’ FC units since the small scale distributed producer can attend to other matters during the burn and, aside from some simple loading principles, does not have to master stocking skills. In addition, with the right kind of feedstock, the inherent product of the JRO is more uniform and likely to be of a higher porosity. On the other hand, the FC trough has a much greater range of acceptable feedstock types without additional processing, a greater bulk char production potential for a given sized unit and the basic design is very flexible and easily sized up to handle feedstock abundance and inherent dimensionality. The basic stocking skills are not that difficult to learn with a bit of practice with the various classes and conditions of the potential feedstock.

The tree trimming char shown here in the unit resulted from the burn of the tree trimming feedstock pictured in photo 20. This unit is on indefinite loan to an up-scale hotel in Chiang Mai to process their grounds trimmings, etc. into char for recycling in their composting program, part of the local anti-smoke pollution program.

Photo 22) Generalized schematic of WH troughs. See table of standard dimensions and photos for added detail of particular units.

Photo 23) Cross-sectional view of upper rim. The spot welds are made at rough intervals of 12 to 18 cm around the rim with the series of welds of angle iron to box iron and angle iron to fire box being offset from each other.